Excerpt from Brian Brock's new book "Captive to Christ, Open to the World"

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CAPTIVE TO CHRIST, OPEN TO THE WORLD On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

BRIAN BROCKedited by Kenneth Oakes

In this wide-ranging and engaging collection of interviews, Brian Brock discusses how Christian faith makes a dierence for life in the modern world. Beginning with a discussion of teaching Christian ethics in the contemporary academy, Brock takes up environmental questions, political and medical ethics, the modern city and Christian responsibility to it, energy use, the information age, agriculture, political consensus and coercion, and many other issues. e reader is thus oered a broad and incisive discussion of many contemporary topics in a brief, illuminating, but never supercial manner. e books unusual conversational style allows strikingly clear, creative, and concrete theological connections to emerge in the spaces between moral questions rarely thought of as linked. As the title suggests, the running theme of the interviews is being bound to Christ and placed into the contemporary world. Brocks theological readings of contem-porary cultural trends are vigorous, unapologetic, and insightful, and they oer delightful surprises as well as fertile new ways through the sterile impasses of many issues currently being debated in the public square. is book provides an excellent starting point for those interested in fresh theological insights into contemporary ethical questions and an accessible introduction to Brocks previous works.

is book invites readers into an ongoing conversation with an engaging and brilliant thinker who makes us think long and well about Scripture, technology, the environment, politics, and more besides. Reading this book feels a bit like Im sitting across from Brian at a cafe, sipping coee and having a robust conversation about crucial questionsquestions that ultimately ask, How will I respond to Christ with my whole life?JANA M. BENNETT, University of Dayton

ese interviews give us a chance to listen in as an erudite and nimble-minded theological ethicist responds to the gamut of issues in our world. Brock advocates an open and unguarded type of Christian engagement in culture, and in this little book the medium ts the message. We cant ask Augustine, Luther, and Bonhoeer how they would respond to the cultural, ecological, and technological issues of our time, but we can listen to Brian Brock think on his feet about what is to be learned from them and from Scripture.FRED SANDERS, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University, California

What a joy it is to sit in on a conversation with someone who grew up in a little Bible church in an industrial backwater in Texas and who now calls an ancient Scottish university his home. Brian expresses a great delight employing his profound Christian faith to engage the world. Anyone who reads this book is in for a great delight. . . . JOHN NAGLE, University of Notre Dame

Brian Brock is Reader in Moral and Practical eology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (2007) and Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (2010), and editor of eology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (2007) and Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012), both with John Swinton.

Kenneth Oakes is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Notre Dame, having previously been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Univer-sity of Tbingen. He is the author of Karl Barth on eology and Philosophy (2012) and Reading Karl Barth: A Companion to the Epistle to the Romans (2011). His articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Modern eology, International Journal of Systematic eology, and e omist.

Captive to Christ, Open to the World

On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

Brian Bro ck

Edited by Ke nneth O akes

Captive to Christ, open to the Worldon doing Christian ethics in public

Copyright 2014 Brian Brock. all rights reserved. except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any man-ner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: permissions, Wipf and stock publishers, 199 W. 8th ave., suite 3, eugene, or 97401.

Cascade Booksan imprint of Wipf and stock publishers199 W. 8th ave., suite 3eugene, or 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-62564-018-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Brock, Brian, 1970-

Captive to Christ, open to the world : on doing Christian ethics in public / Brian Brock ; edited by Kenneth oakes.

xviii + 144 pp. ; 23 cm. includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-62564-018-5

1. Christian ethics. 2. technologyreligious aspectsChristianity. 3. higher education. i. title.

BJ59 .B77 2014

Manufactured in the U.s.a.

For Russ because he asked

Contents

Introduction by Kenneth Oakes ix

1 scripture, Modernity, doxology 1

2 technology, precursors, resistance 26

3 environmentalism, teaching Theology, nationalism 41

4 energy, Mobility, economy 63

5 intentional Community, Good Works, listening and responding 77

6 higher education, City planning, heaven and earth 92

7 Medicine, daily Bread, politics, and violence 111

8 Theology in the University, Manicheans today, realist Christianity 129

Bibliography 141

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Scripture, Modernity, Doxology

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us how you have developed your interest in theology and, more specifically, in the sort of doxologi-cal exegesis that your book, Singing the Ethos of God, so passionately advocates?

i grew up in a little Bible church in an industrial backwater in texas. it was a very anti-intellectual world, but one in which the Bible was taken seriously. There was a real sense that faith mattered to life and the Bible was living, rich, and worth reading. so i was taught the content of the Bible, and i was shown that it mattered. This is not to suggest that this upbringing was free of all the problems we might expect from fundamentalist-puritan-Bible belt southern religion. i can remember smugly chuckling away as my pas-tor said from the pulpit that education didnt make you wiser, and that phd just meant piled higher and deeper. (he didnt mean paperwork, though it would have been a much more insightful comment if he had.) This eccle-sial home shaped my understanding of the world, situated as it was in the middle of a pretty bleak landscape of refineries and mind-numbing popular culture. in some vague way i felt stifled and oppressed by the narrowness both of the ecclesial world and the local culture, which is why scripture represented an outcropping of something ancient and majestic and true that always seemed quite a bit richer than the sermons i was hearing out of it.


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This makes it all the more ironic that it was in the midst of the most exhilarating intellectual time of my life that i found that, in a sense, my childhood pastor was right about the tendency of education to cut us off from scripture. My sense that Singing the Ethos of God needed to be writ-ten crystallized in an oxford seminar on the use of the Bible in Christian ethics. in that seminar several world-class biblical scholars and moral theologians gathered in a room full of the english-speaking worlds future pastors and academic theologians (and one sitting bishop) to try to discern the ethical implications of a few classic biblical passages. The results were disastrous. occasional flashes of insight emerged, but we were all left with the overwhelming impression that so much complicated critical machinery had been interposed between us and scripture that we (meaning primar-ily academically trained theologians) no longer had the skills to handle it directly. i was shocked and unsettled that the church of the reformation, the very church that had come into being with the rediscovery of the Bible, could be in such a state. adding insult to injury, when i went to biblical commentaries to see if they had anything to bring to the discussion of con-temporary ethical questions, i found precious little that connected with the burning questions of the age. The conclusion seemed inevitable: the way the theological academy teaches us to conceive our relationship to scrip-ture makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find our way from scripture to the ethical questions of our real, lived lives, and conversely, we are taught that the people who are quite obviously doing this (like the Bible-believers i grew up with) were not doing so in an academically respectable manner.

This set me thinking, and more importantly, reading. i discovered that the great theologians of the past not only could and did read scripture directly and theologically, but their thinking about contentious moral ques-tions often took the form of biblical commentary. They were able to do this because they so regularly practiced the art of theological commentary. Thomas aquinas, for instance, when he was teaching his students in lec-ture halls, lectured almost exclusively in the form of biblical commentary. Calvin lectured or preached on scripture at least one hour every single day. Because modern Christians know these theologians only through their sys-tematic works, the Summa Theologica and Institutes respectively, we have lost sight of the vast intellectual effort these scholars poured into direct biblical commentary, and how it formed their theologizing. The same can be said of almost all of the great Western theologians before the modern period. i found this fact and its contemporary eclipse striking.


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The more i looked into it, the clearer it became that these great biblical interpreters exposed the poverty of modern Christians, and of modern the-ology and biblical studies. Modern theologians, by and large, have drawn the conclusion after decades of bad experiences with biblical scholars that they dont know enough of the technical details to comment on scripture. The favor is returned to biblical scholars by theologians who point out that being an expert on one book of the Bible does not qualify you to speak about the whole, which puts one onto the terrain of systematic theology where the various claims that are made in scripture are balanced and or-dered with the aim of forming a coherent body of recognizable Christian doctrine.

Fifteen years ago not many people had yet spotted how far this stale-mate removes us from what has passed as theology for our forebearers in the faith, though many more people are alive to this problem now. i de-cided that the best way to bring this older tradition back into view, in which theology and biblical exegesis went hand in hand, was simply to show the masters at work. This is why the main section of Singing the Ethos of God follows augustine and then luther as they comment on and draw out what they take to be the ethical implications of the psalms. i call this doxological exegesis because it is interpreting the text of scripture in the same attentive way that biblical scholars and sometimes theologians do today (exegesis), but it differs from what we have come to expect because it does so before and to God and so as a mode of praise. The psalms resist being reduced to mere carriers of information because they are so clearly songs of praise. rather than turning them into text from which we attempt to extract meanings, ive proposed that we begin the other way around: what hap-pens if we read all of scripture as if what we were engaged in can be done in the mode of a song of praise to God? hence my title: Singing the Ethos of God.

One of your major complaints in the first part of Singing is that Chris-tian ethics and biblical exegesis have grown apart. Although this has happened in manifold ways, one consistent tendency, in the modern West at least, is that ethicists have come to favor categorical imperatives, hermeneutical models, and other forms of theory or method over a mere listening to Scripture. Why has this occurred? Has it all started, as you suggest in the introduction (xv), with a feeling of foreignness or estrangement from the Biblea distance that theory subsequently had to bridge? But isnt such a foreignness something experienced in all ages?


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i fear that i cant do justice to this question without introducing some technical distinctions. ill risk beginning with the bold generalization that what we call modern theology is perhaps best understood if we think of it as one long response to a rising tide of secular reason. secular reason is that form of human reasoning that has consciously decided to think and live without reference to God. The icon of this cultural transition was the famous declaration of the French scientist laplace, who explained why his scientific theory did not make reference to God with the famous quip, i have no need of that hypothesis. When enough people agree that certain spheres of reason can and should proceed as if God does not exist, then something like a public secular reason can emerge. This makes sense even to Christians today. Why should the science of meteorology not proceed as if God is not actively involved in changing the weather? But this new intel-lectual landscape does create new intellectual problems for Christians, who read in the Bible that God sends the rain and speaks in the thunderbolts, and who regularly encounter in their own theological traditions stories like that of luther, who experienced a lightning strike as a divine word and claim on his life. The fewer people who can think and talk as if a God who acts in history matters, the more Christian theologians have to think about how they are going to communicate what they find important, and how they are going to explain the relation between the rule of natural causality, which science can describe, and Gods own working, which seems not to have been left any room to maneuver.

The early modern deists decided that they would resolve this dilemma by saying that Gods rule is through the natural laws that he has put in mo-tion, and therefore that God either will not or cannot breach the laws of the natural world, and this settlement allowed an idea of God that did not con-flict with what scientific observation could tell us about the mechanisms of the natural world. The upshot was that science was taken to tell us about the world, and religion was taken to give us morality and motivation. in this model scripture must be distilled down to what it tells us about believing in God and about moral ideals and motivation. i would suggest that, in very broad brush strokes, the deists won the day for the majority of modern Christians, which is why the language of moral principles is so dominant in modern ethical talk, both inside and outside of the churches, whether conservative or liberal.

in contrast, in the ancient and medieval contexts it was clear that, in different ways, all moral claims were entailments of metaphysical truth


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claims, and that these claims were directly embodied in different ethics. The stoics, for instance, viewed the universe as made up of active and pas-sive substances. if this is the constitution of the universe, they reasoned, then it is clear that the appropriate ethic is one in which the major task is to rise above the buffeting of merely earthly circumstances into the realm of the unchanging substances (which is why we now think of someone who is stoic as being rather cold). The epicureans were the precursors of our modern view of matter as made up of atoms. Believing that all matter is in motion led them to postulate that, since the highest good of humans is happiness, we need to participate in this cycle of change by living a life of sensuous participation in the world, which is why they later came to be caricatured as being given to excess.

This presupposed linkage of metaphysics and ethics continued to hold in the early Middle ages, as talk about how Christians are to live well was assumed to be an entailment of the metaphysical reality of Jesus Christs work in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection as well as his on-going rule through the spirit. Within this overarching agreement among Christians, however, another ancient distinction gained new prominence in the high Middle ages, between thought conceived as separable from and superior to the questions of daily life, labeled theoretical reason, and those forms of reasoning available even to the unlearned, or practical rea-son. practical reason was understood as pertaining to all the remaining knowledge needed to live in the mutable world, the knowledge of when to reap and sow, how to judge a court case, or how to raise children. Theo-retical reason was concerned with the very structure of reality, with God, space, time, and being, and this was understood to be the most unchang-ing sort of knowledge. participating in theoretical reasoning was not a real option for those who did not have the time to dedicate to study, nor was it relevant for the practical arts, which were understood to be oriented by knowledge about the passing things of this world: how to tell when a cow is about to give birth, or when it is going to rain.

This division of the theoretical and the practical is the second important conceptual distinction that marks our present, following the drifting apart of reasoning that makes no reference to faith (secular) and reasoning that takes doctrine and scripture seriously. Modernity can be understood not only as the age of secular reason, but also as the time in which the gap between theory and practice grew wider before collapsing entirely. immanuel Kant (17241804) formalized this distinction in a way


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that was to have wide reaching implications for modern ethics when he separated his theory of the premises of ethical duty (now called meta-ethics) from questions about the contexts within which these duty-rules are worked out (now called special ethics, or practical reasoning).1 Within this new separation of practical life from human theorizing about the world, it becomes possible to conceive of ethics, an account of how we are to live, as derived from, or reliant on, what we know, that is, what we believe. ethics is the discipline within the realm of theoretical reason that gives us the core moral claims that we are to enact in our lived (read practical reasoning) lives. Understood in this way, the problem of eth-ics becomes how to hold together what natural and theoretical reason (human reason unaided by revelation and operating at the level of abstrac-tions) knows with the fine textures and situations of daily life. Whereas for the ancients the question was, Which account of reality best orients ones day to day living?, the modern question is, how does what i believe relate to how i live? to be a modern Christian is to experience a split between what is thought and confessed and what is lived, a split that is embodied in the academy in the estrangement of Christian theology and ethics, and again in the split between theology and scripture.

From a theological perspective, then, modernity names that time in which Christians face the problem of finding an appropriate response to secular morality, as well as the temptation to claim they have a morality separable from their doctrinal affirmations about the reality of the work of Jesus Christ. it is also the time in which God has largely been reduced to the provider of moral principles, as Kant explicitly espoused. The story of Christian ethics in the last 150 years is lamentable as it is largely a story of succumbing to the temptation to embrace these distinctions. Thus it is not a great exaggeration to say that the whole configuration of modern theol-ogy would need to be rethought in order to get anywhere with the problem of the very evident chasm that lies for us between scripture and ethics. The reality that modern technology has collapsed the distinction between theoretical and practical reason accentuates the need to go beyond the arti-ficiality of the ethics of modernity.

1. This distinction is fundamental to the highly influential concept of the categorical imperative developed by immanuel Kant in Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals.


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On my reading, Singing is a very Bonhoefferian book, even though you make some critical observations on Bonhoeffers underdeveloped pneu-matology. In fact, I have the impression that many of the conclusions could also be derived from a careful, attentive consideration of Bon-hoeffers Ethics. At the very least, those Bonhoeffer fragments known as the Ethics also lament the modern separation of ethics and exegesis and try to overcome that separation by reconceptualizing Christian ethics as the art of meditation on how God speaks to our heart in prayerful me-diation on Scripture. Would you agree? How important is Bonhoeffer to you, as a source of inspiration and as a model of the kind of exegetical theology you have in mind?

This observation of the precise way Bonhoeffer has influenced my fram-ing questions is very well spotted. Bonhoeffer influences my beginning to explicitly theologize in the pivotal chapter 4 of Christian Ethics in a Tech-nological Age. Bonhoeffer is important to me because he opens up in two directions: backward into luther and forward, or laterally, into Barth. i would understand these two thinkers as Bonhoeffers most continuous and constructive dialogue partners. This is a conversation that i find very rich and that has formed me in many ways. in terms of my own intellectual journey, knowing Barth well prepared me to appreciate what Bonhoeffer was doing, including what he was doing differently than Barth. This has also allowed me to read Bonhoeffer as an example of what it might mean to be a modern theologian who draws from the vast ocean of luthers theol-ogy, which, i would argue, has been the mainspring for the dominance of German theology, and indeed, philosophy, in the modern era.

For instance, Bonhoeffers notion of prayerful meditation on scripture is clearly one of the places where he has genuinely been excited by one of the more profound insights of luther, as i tried to show in Singing. Bonhoeffers highly theological and methodologically aware account of Christian ethics set out in his Ethics was also catalyzed by and is a response to Barths discus-sion of Christian ethics in Church Dogmatics ii/2. Barth later responds in his own ways to Bonheoffers ethical writings in later volumes of the Church Dogmatics. i dont always take Bonhoeffers side in the extended discussion taking place between these three saints, but i always find his investigations illuminating, not least because of their fragmentary nature and the bio-graphical context in which they were forged.


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One of the books key terms is ethos. In Aristotles rhetoric, ethos is a mode of persuasion, distinguished from both logos and pathos. In your account, ethos is related, but not identical, to such terms as divine dra-ma (Balthasar), divine grammar (Lindbeck), character (Hauerwas), and habitus.2 Hans Ulrich, in turn, calls it a place and space of living.3 Could you please give some terminological clarification? More specifi-cally, what is the advantage of ethos over, for example, character?

in Singing the Ethos of God i discussed the points of convergence and di-vergence of the ethos or grammar of Christian action as i am using these terms from the accounts found in George lindbeck and telford Work. i subsequently wished i had done much more to make clear that my interest is not so much in Balthasarian theodrama but in the dramatics of faith. im not interested in highlighting the need for an aesthetic grasp of my whole life, nor even, in every case, the whole context of my own action, as the theodrama tradition tends to suggest. i use dramatics to indicate the pro meity aspect of the life of faith, the reality that if Christ died for me and is my savior, then it is not illegitimate to pray for divine rescue. i am a recovering stoic puritan, prone to understanding God as the one who gives us the principles to live by that will get us through life intact if we can just find the repentance and willpower to enact those principles. (here we can see how the Kantian ethic of principles and the deist ethic of divine non-intervention can fit very nicely together in modern versions of Christianity.) But Barth, Bonhoeffer, and luther have taught me that we will never save ourselves through living by good principles: we do, in fact, need a living rescuer and ruler. We simply live differently if we live in trust of a person or trusting that we have a good set of guiding principles.

The life of faith is a bit like driving at night a little faster than your headlights allow. This situation is dramatic, in that anything can happen. That something unexpected will happen is a certainty, but we simply can-not know what it will be or when it will happen. But time rolls on and we never escape living in time that we experience as motion. i consider luthers Lectures on Genesis his systematic theology, and in it his main concern is to show how God puts people like abraham, isaac, and Jacob into motion by calling them to certain tasks, and it is up to them for long stretches of their life to remain faithful to what they have been called to

2. Brock, Singing, 264.3. Ulrich, on Finding our place, 139.


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do. They must live according to the divine claim that has been made on them, which means figuring out what faithfulness to that claim means in their so-called practical reasoning, and yet knowing all the while that they are reliant on God to make sure that they are not thwarted by events they cannot control. They have to wait for things, they are frustrated by twists in the plot they cannot control, and they have to figure out what to do in all sorts of situations. But it is the divine claim that redirects their motion, and it is their faith to attempt to continue on the trajectory this claim has made on them in their daily life. This is not to suggest that each ones life is now organized into a single unified narrative. There are many layers of narra-tives in which they live, each of which has its own tensions and releases, and their lives as a whole cannot, therefore, be easily grasped by saying that they are making progress, or that they are passing through stages of life because they know Gods promises. They cant even say that they know concretely where their lives are going or when they will end. Thus we can say that the life of faith has, in a certain sense, a static structurewe are constantly passing through the doorway of the now, sometimes under more or less trepidation or satisfaction. i suspect that if i had taken more time to clarify these points in more detail then some of the links with the luther chapter especially would have been more apparent.

With the term ethos, i am therefore indicating overarching types or forms of action that any individual may or may not be enacting in a given moment, the kind of thing we are indicating, for instance, when we say that someone swaggers. The term character has the distinct disadvantage in contemporary usage of directing moral analysis to ourselves as agents, making it very difficult to separate from the quest for self-possession and so for self-satisfaction. put simply, to ask what i should do in this particular situation in light of the lordship of Jesus Christ and in expectation of his salvation will bring quite different sorts of considerations into view than asking how what i might do in this situation might make me a better and more virtuous person. hence the danger of self-satisfactionon one side in using the other person as an occasion for my moral improvement, and on the other in the concern to craft myself into a person who possesses all the virtues. The language i pick up from luther of the art of the forgetting the self is a way of indicating how moral deliberation is to incorporate the i who deliberates.

here Kant, with his categorical imperative to never treat others as means but as ends only, lives off of the capital banked by lutherthe right


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thing to do cannot be good simply because it will contribute to building my character or making me a better person. The forgetfulness luther espouses cuts off the temptation to tout any moral progress we may have made and that the language of character implies we should be making. i would not deny that in the life of faith we are made into different people, and i hope for the better, but i dont think scripture allows us to frame Christian ethics as a matter of moral improvement. if this were the case, Jesus would have certainly spent more time praising the brother who stayed home rather than the love of the Father for the prodigal son. Moral improvement is the result, not the aim of Christian ethics. did david or sampson achieve a better character through faith? i think not. did they display a faithful habitus? sometimes more so and sometimes less so. But they certainly had a dramatic life of faith and were never abandoned by a God who kept inter-vening in their lives and directing them to intervene in those of others. My use of ethos intends to name this dramatic feature of faith as well as the fact that their faith waxed and waned, and with it the appropriateness of their actions. each in their own way displayed moments, whether short or long, of hearing and responding in faith to the divine claim. in my view, learning to read scripture well involves learning to identify the points when such biblical characters exemplify a proper ethos of faith and those other points when they are examples of yet another form of self-serving ethos. in this usage ethos is therefore naming the observable grammar of the ways they are enacting faithare they swaggering or slouching?

im following luther here in suggesting that the way we move in life flows from the comportment of the heart, and here the psalms help us to see the inner dialogue with God that characterizes the faithful moments of the biographies of many biblical characters. david is not the most prominent psalmist by accident: his was an exemplary faith and relationship with God, and his psalms offer all Christians a faith that they can embrace wholesale because they depict the hearts wrestling with God over the dramatics of life. When we look at his biography, it is clear that sometimes davids heart was harder than others and therefore his acts were examples of ways of living we should also avoid.

Using driving to illustrate these points is therefore appropriate be-cause of its modesty in suggesting that when we talk about Christian ethics issues of style are not in the foreground except to the extent that they help us discern our stance toward God. Blessed are those says the first verse of the psalms, who do not walk in the way of sinners (actively pursuing


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with the crowd those things which God detests), nor do they sit in the seat of scoffers (stopping and taking up residence with the skeptical and endlessly ironic). notice that sitting like a scoffer brings a certain image to our mind that indicates not only a mode of human investment of energy that is self-destructive, but also one which is made visible by the tonality of the sittingit displays a comportment of the heart. This is what i mean by ethos. driving as an example of faith reminds us that yes, there are rules of the road, but a good driver is not reducible to a good rule follower. driv-ing cant be done at all without shaped perceptions and reflexes that have a different bodily logic than the rules that the driver must obey, and have to do with momentum, acceleration, and deceleration, a feel for how the con-trols work, and so on. i want simply to stress that God takes us out of our comfort zone, and that in such places we must live by hope and from the promises of God as given to us in scripture. This means that we never have the script memorized, but must always go back to scripture and chew on it in the hope that God will remind us of how he has promised to be toward us, and so set our hearts aright.

The second key term is singing. As I understand you, singing stands opposed to criticism in two significant ways: (a) it praises instead of analyzes, and (b) is a matter of first-order participation rather than second-order observation. Im sure, however, that our readers need some explanation at this point. So, what is so important about singing? And, in practical terms: what does it imply for our congregations (for our ser-mons, catechetical practices, hymn singing, and so forth)?

Youve clearly hit on my two main terms, and i have to resist saying that the whole book is a response to this question! Your two summary points are spot on, so thank you for so nicely encapsulating two of the books key emphases.

singing names a human stance that refuses to think of God and humans as entities that are conceivable without reference to the other. i think the creation stories of Genesis open the story of God and humans with a clear reminder that we were not meant to be autonomous. We are not happier or healthier when we go it on our own without God. it there-fore questions the very heart of modern, Western ethical culture, which is based on the idea that we are meant to become morally self-aware and self-responsible beings, that is, autonomous. Whatever else we might say


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about the Fall, we probably ought to say that because we are fallen we find it exceedingly difficult to think of God and humans in right and continual relationship.

im interested in what happens when we stop thinking of God as a deist God who has provided us, through scripture, with the moral princi-ples we need to live a good life and then stepped out of the picture. if this is the way things really are then anyone who picks up the instruction manual can work out the rules of the game. This is the insight of the communitarian account of Christian ethics, which refuses to think of Christian ethics as a matter of principles that can be learned by an individual, but insists that scripture is tied to a community. But the communitarians dont make a second move that i think is important, which is to ask how God is present to us, and how this presence ought to shape our action in every sphere.

This second move is crucial. When we ask what is God doing? the first thing that happens is that, if we take scripture seriously, we start to see that God is at work and present to us in an infinite number of ways. God has provided the means of our daily sustenance and ensures that the fertility of the plant and animal world does not dry up and so starve us. The continuance of the human race as a whole depends on a similar type of di-vinely gifted fecundity. The sources of this fecundity cannot be controlled, though we do try. in addition, we cannot bring about peace between peo-ple, neither in our homes nor in our societies as a whole. We can court and invite peace between people, but we cannot create it. none of these things can be unilaterally forced, but must be invited, awaited, received. When we try to manipulate things like political consensus with spin doctors or governments by opinion polls, we do not live as if it is God who must bring peace between people but take it upon ourselves to ensure that peace, like everything else, is a product we can produce if enough effort and skill are applied, like the sausage we can count on appearing if we fill the machine at the top and turn the crank. We aim to do the same with the fertility of the natural world and human fertility. We would be much more comfortable if we could get it all under control, running smoothly to our schedules. or at least this is the aspiration i call technological. Thus singing and technology are the opposing poles that shape contemporary Christian faith, and my two books can be read as exploring the one question of the appropriate ethos of the Christian but beginning from different ends of this spectrum. The term ethos allows me to say that in some points and in some ways i am living as if Christ is lord, and in other parts of life (perhaps


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unbeknownst to me) i am trying to get my way and rule my personal world, if not the whole world.

You have written, What we trust we praise; the form of our faith is de-tectible in our praises.4 I think this is an important insight, especially for those of us infected by the hermeneutics of suspicion underlying so much of our (academic) criticism. More specifically, one might conceive of criticism not only as an anti-doxological activity, but also as an implicit form of self-praise. At the very least, our criticism tends to presuppose our own ability to judge, and also often our superiority over those whom we subject to criticism. This made me wonder whether, perhaps, the real difference between praise and criticism is the position of the subject. Isnt praise an art of forgetting the self ? (Think of how Bonhoeffer, following Luther, describes the Christian life as the process of being liberated from the cor corvum in se [the heart that is turned in on itself].)

You have nicely captured my interest in using doxological language in order to expose our tendency to praise our various quests to go it alone and to save ourselves in what we think is a less incriminating key. i take this to be a contemporary restatement of the priority of grace that the reformers recovered from the church fathers and scripture.

if the appropriate and truly human stance before God is one of praise, and therefore of service and witness, it is deeply problematic to pursue any type of project in which self-conscious attempts to shape our lives become a primary objective rather than an effect of having been claimed by oth-ers in ways that inevitably give our lives a shape. This is the problem of the Lebensphilosophie-type approach that has gained so much ground in German practical theology, and of the english-speaking offshoots of liberal and post-liberal theologies that understand Christian ethics as churchly deliberation about the formation of our identities. in these intellectual traditions the church is understood to be drawing on a stock of traditional and biblical images to make collective decisions about who it will be. it is precisely this quest to form identity, albeit in a Christian way, that drove the early development of the english-speaking communitarian ethics move-ment, which you rightly note that i criticize.5

4. Brock, attunement to saints past and present, 161.5. This criticism appears in Brock, Singing, ch. 2.


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in my view, quite a lot would have to be adjusted if we began to try to disentangle the contemporary english-speaking communitarian dis-course from its deep enmeshment in the more common modern search to define my identity that so completely dominates the liturgies of our secular-consumerist-Facebook culture. Yes, i think that we become readers of scripture in the ecclesial community, but if we are to be really incisive interpreters of our present, we need to be able to see the ways in which our contemporary ecclesial communities are in lockstep with the gods of the age. to do this, i suggest in Singing, we need to widen our concept of the community with whom we are learning to interpret scripture to the saints throughout the ages. saying this puts the discussion of how our reading community forms us in a very different conceptual register than it does for those whose primary interest is in how we speak and live in ways that make us fit in with our workmates, our national cultures, and even our local church communities. it is an ecumenical vision in the widest possible sense.

I am glad that you offer such a thoughtful, spiritual alternative to the modern obsession with method.6 But isnt there a risk of overstating the contrast between your own position and the methodological discourses you criticize? Let me put the question this way: once prayerful medita-tion on Scripture is our starting point, how then does criticism continue to function7? It is difficult to imagine biblical exegesis proceeding in a manner entirely devoid of rules or guidelines, as you seem to suggest elsewhere with your comment that, Good readings are ones in which multiple traditions meet to reveal new complexities of Gods truth.8

My question is: where does methodological reflection take place? at what point in the reading of scripture do we stop and think, do i have this right? i am certainly not denying that we should think hard about this question of understanding rightly and in a way that can be rationally ex-plained. The dominant answer to this question is offered by modern criti-cism, which assumes that we can ask this question before we start reading. phenomenologically speaking, this is a sleight of hand. We are born into and move in and out of traditions that shape our reading, this modern critical

6. ibid., xiii.7. ibid., 311.8. ibid., 279.


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tradition as well as many others. There are nave pre-critical exegetical traditions easily to be found in Christian churches, especially those two-Thirds World churches that have so quickly become the majority of world Christianity, not to mention the pre-critical interpretation that formed the backbone of Christian theology. put bluntly, if we insist dogmatically that the modern form of criticism is the only form of criticism, then we will end up looking down on most of the Christian tradition of exegesis as well as most of the worlds Christians who do simply read the Bible without starting out with the methodological discussions that essentially stalled the oxford seminar on the Bible and ethics i referred to above.

We ask the question of exegetical method, then, in the middle of sev-eral impasses. on the one hand we have the nave readers of the contem-porary churches around the world, who just get on with reading in all sorts of ways, according to the standards of good reading in their own communi-ties, and we have the scholarly Western church, which has a real problem getting from the Bible to ethics and back. some take the Bible as scripture and have no critical relation to it, and some know how to treat the Bible as text but not as scripture. neither, it seems to me, offers a working account of how we are to understand the role of past readers of scripture in shaping our own ways of reading it.

it is indisputable that we can think about how we read scripture, a form of thought that has been called hermeneutics and that raises ques-tionscrucial questionsabout the ways we are reading a text in order to make it more rigorous and rationally explicable. This is one of the ways of thinking that marks theologians today as modern theologians, and this sen-sitivity is a gift of the transition from Christendom into our current setting in which secular reason is dominant. But it is also historically observable that any rules or guidelines we might formulate as we read are ones that are constantly being revised and sharpened in the face of a canon of scripture that remains fixed. rules and guidelines may well be the way a given reading tradition gives us access to scripture, but they do not ensure critical reading, nor do we learn them and learn what they mean before we begin to read.

putting the point more practically: i am writing a commentary on 1 Corinthians with Bernd Wannenwetsch. in the course of our attempts to comment on the chapters in the order that they are presented by paul we occasionally stop and pursue methodological questions, asking what larger theological presuppositions are at stake as we try to interpret this or


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that passage. We had a long debate about whether or not to open the book with an introduction or a preface. our having such a debate flows from our shared insistence that any discussion of method be tied to the content that we are trying to interpret. if we are forced to admit that we have hermeneu-tical rules, then we have only one: that methodological reflection always be tied to the text being interpreted in the context in which it is being inter-preted, that is, in the context of our more temporally and geographically local church as the place from which we interact with the universal church. Methodological reflection is thus ineradicably tied to the communion of saints. to read scripture is to hear those who wrote it amidst those contem-porary Christians with whom we are also talking and in whose language we must speak if we are to read at all. in the deepest sense this means that all theology is biblical translation.

If you are right about the role and place of method among Christian ethi-cists, it might well be argued that we postmodern churchgoers without any education in theology, often suffer from the opposite problem: we do whatever we think or, more often perhaps, feel is appropriate for a twenty-first-century Christian, even if that runs counter to traditional Christian lifestyle precepts. Sure, we pray before eating our industrially farmed meat, we ask God for help as we start another sixty-hour work week, and sincerely hope that our mortgage will allow us to donate some money to a charity. And, yes, we also read our Bible. We agree that this may raise difficult questionsin our Bible study group, we wonder whether we are still obliged to tithebut do not seriously consider those ancient moral prescriptions, written for Jews or Christians some thousands of years ago, as binding for us. We would rather quote Romans 14: Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.

Granted that there might be some exaggeration in this portrayal, dont you think that, in this specific context, your aversion to method and hermeneutics may have a counter-productive effect? The problem is not an overabundance of method; the problem is that we, in spite of our sinful habits, honestly believe we live a Christian life. And as long as it is commonly accepted that we can justify that claim by appeal to individual experience or conscience, no Bible study group (the com-munitarian solution) is likely to correct us. Therefore, dont we post-modern Christians need theologians who tell us firmly: understanding yourself as part of the Christian story implies that you live out that story


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by giving up your materialism, consumerism, and workaholism? Dont we need theologians who dare to challenge our Christian behavior by simply pointing out that there are well-established rules for biblical ex-egesis? Gordon J. Wenham has the same worry: Individualism can run riot, and all sorts of outrageous ideas may be claimed to be justified on the basis of meditation on the Scriptures.9

The best way to answer this question, very much in agreement with your awareness of the tight linkage of reading and living, is to indicate how i think that the rejection of interpretative rules works in practice. in 1 Cor-inthians 6 paul discusses the problem of Christians going to prostitutes and then defending their behavior as non-moral on the grounds that what we do with our bodies does not save or damn us. (notice that both the defend-ers of this behavior and their opponents would have found it easy to invoke the be convinced in your own mind interpretative rule!) Writing from his professorial desk in the small and charming north england town of dur-ham, in the early 1960s, C. K. Barrett did not feel very close to the Medi-terranean culture of the first century. This led him to locate the problem of porneia, and so pauls rather strong injunction to flee it, firmly in the past: temptations to fornication were so common in Corinth that mere disapproval was likely to be inadequate; strong evasive action would be necessary.10 Barrett is clearly imagining that the Corinthians back then lived in a sex-soaked age that he experienced as distant from his own ex-perience. and in fact this distancing is fundamental to the understanding of biblical criticism that is dominant in biblical studies. We must first ask what the writers of scripture meant to say in their own contexts, and only then can we ask if it has any relevance for us. This distancing of our present from the past in which scripture resides makes perfect sense within the hermeneutical rules of the guild of modern critical biblical studies, which forces us into the position of having to see the Corinthians as in no way our contemporaries. This is what i am referring to when i say modern biblical studies rests on an assumed gap between Christian ethics and scripture.

But what happens if we try to take paul a little more seriously as an apostle, and the Corinthians as human beings with sexual drives and maybe even a sexualized culture not so unlike our own? The cultural changes in motion since Barretts day make it a little more difficult to maintain the

9. Wenham, reflections on singing the ethos of God, 119.10. Barrett, Corinthians, 150.


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illusion that somehow the Corinthians had a lot of explicit sex in their soci-ety whereas, we, for instance, have done away with cultic prostitution. The backdrop of our experiences of the role of sex in advertising, the sexual-ization of childrens fashion, the mainstreaming of pornography, the inter-twining of the porn industry with other more reputable industries all make it more difficult to meaningfully preserve the belief that we are culturally distant from the Corinthians. if we are paying attention to developments in our Western cultures then we can already call on a range of first-hand experiences through which we can begin to glimpse ways in which we are closer to the Corinthians of the 50s ad than biblical criticism likes to admit. We read in the papers every day about peoples claims that what they have done online should not be held legally liable because it was just talk or just trading pictures that hasnt harmed anyone. The moral argu-ment here seems quite close to the Corinthian believers who were going to prostitutes and defending it as none of the churchs business. if we take paul seriously as the churchs apostle, and not just the Corinthians apostle, then as we read him we may well find ourselves faced by the question of whether we are more like the Corinthians than we had at first assumed. But we will only be able to hear the apostle put this question to us if we do not insulate ourselves with the modern assumption that people in the past were somehow more primitive thinkers or were less morally sophisticated, suffering from problems and malformations of faith that we have somehow surmounted as participants in a later and supposedly more developed era.11

The way the gospel in this biblical passage will change us is not be-cause we will discover in it a general rule for all ages, but because as we read it the spirit convicts the church: What we are doing on our computers is not right, and we repent and seek new ways of living. sex is an easy target for this point, but i think the same sort of process is true across the whole of human existence, not only in our sexual practices, but in our practices of work, politics, and even our eating. Those Christians who are pushed out of the comfortable stasis of the habits of their own age and begin repentantly to explore alternative ways of living are the true and powerful witnesses to the gospels power to change the world because they display precisely how different habits can be discovered in which new life is found. as an ethicist i can prepare the way for this conviction and explorative response by asking about all sorts of modern ways of life: have you thought about this? But

11. For more on this theme see Brock, with Wannenwetsch, ein moralisches ange-bot, 9297.


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i am wary of the pharisaism of having all the answers for others, which is always seductive to moral theologians.

Earlier in this series we interviewed Richard Hays and asked him how The Moral Vision of the New Testament could spend hundreds of pages on what one might call a moral hermeneutics without referring more than in passing to the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those who read the Bible for moral instruction. Although Hays agreed that his pneumatology ought to be further developed, he added that the herme-neutics outlined in The Moral Vision does not at all intend to exclude divine inspiration or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In fact, he hoped his hermeneutics would offer a hermeneutical specification of the guid-ance of the Holy Spirit and the presence of Christ, in the hope that these are more than pious phrases. Obviously, it is easy to criticize this line of thought (How could you ever pretend to capture the Holy Spirit in a model?). Yet, at the same time, isnt there some wisdom in Hayss refusal to see hermeneutics and inspiration as mutually exclusive?

it is often said that the term hermeneutics derives from hermes, the god of communication. hermes has, at least in contemporary discussions, become synonymous with the messenger angel responsible for carrying messages between distant places. This intermediary can thus reveal how things that seem chaotic and random on their surface are actually expressions of hid-den patterns. hermes is the god who drops ideas into our head that do not follow from the surface reading of things, and so names that moment when we make unexpected connections between things that seem totally unrelated to each other on first glance. i have in mind moments like those in childhood, when we notice that the ripples in the sand in the water at the beach have the same shape and pattern as the cirrostratus clouds above, high in the atmosphere. hermes has become the placeholder for that the click, the aha when we see how one pattern can be the double of another from a very different place, with the effect that both become much more obvious and intelligible. This ancient hermes i like very much, he sounds like the work of the spirit to me, but i experience the modern discourse of hermeneutics as hermeticlargely sealed and deadand as such an enemy of making such rapid and surprising connections. as a discipline modern hermeneutics seems much more interested in telling me what i cannot say than what i can say. like all criticism it can only say no, not teach us how


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we are going to actually say yes. This parallels the driving example above, in that the rules of the road tell us what we must not do, but simply ignore the problem of telling us how to get a car moving.

i have just given an example about how we might understand the spirit to find connections between our lives and that of the worlds of scrip-ture, the example of 1 Corinthians 6. on my reading the work of the spirit in relation to scripture is precisely to make such unexpected connections. When i read the tradition of premodern Christian exegesis, what i see are many such breathtaking leaps being made. But when i read texts in the modern discipline of hermeneutics, including the Christian versions, it looks to me like it wants to justify or judge the surprising leaps of good reading that must happen and that it nevertheless cannot truly explain. Criticism therefore always comes after the fact even though it rhetorically positions itself as taking place before. hays, for instance, is a good reader of scripture, not because he has good hermeneutical rules, but because he pays attention to the actual flow of the text in a theologically attuned way, making wonderful theological connections. i would offer him as another example of the way the modern theological hermeneutics in fact must rest on theological and exegetical claims that in most cases are much more in-teresting than the hermeneutical rules that are supposed to summarize how good biblical interpretations have been produced. speaking biographically, i decided to write Singing in part because i was terribly bored by read-ing hermeneutic theory, and had tired of hearing people who were good at talking about it, but could never bring any living water from scripture. i had enough experience of Christians and of traditional exegesis to know that if we are forced into an either-or situation, there is more to be gained from those who know more of scripture and less of theory than the other way around. so i went looking for hermes and the spirit found me.

hermeneutical rules are not like a machine you can turn on to manu-facture interpretations. That we even aspire to such a machine says more about our participation in a rival modern technological tradition than it does about the content depicted in scripture. The experimental musical compositions of the 1960s and 1970s that consisted in several tape players going slowly out of synchronization, serial composition, or Jackson pol-locks mechanistic automaton paintings showed us what it looks like when we defeat ourselves by trying to do away with hermes, or the inspiring spirit. i agree that we should test interpretations by reference to doctrine, but i do not agree that the guidance of the holy spirit can be specified with


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hermeneutical rules, especially not in advance. Moreover, the best Chris-tian exegetes may have a set of interpretative moves on which they regularly rely, but they would never say that they first had their hermeneutic theory right before they interpreted. if push came to shove, this is why i would still posit an antithesis between what the modern hermeneutics discourse asks of Christians and what has characterized the churchs own ways of teaching believers to understand scripture rightly as described in scripture and as practiced in the majority of the Christian tradition.

A related problem, or a similar sort of question: In a response to your book, Wenham criticizes you for being too critical of the communitarian approach. In his view, the communitarians rightly identify the Christian community (the church) as the locus of Christian ethics. In your reply, you merely repeat a point made in Singing: that the communitarians, in your reading at least, are so sure that they are the Church that close read-ing of Scripture seems to fade in importance.12 But this, I would say, is two conflate two distinctions: (a) between close reading or not, and (b) between individual and communal practices of reading. I wholeheart-edly agree with your insistence on the need for close, attentive reading of Gods Word. But the question is: do we practice such reading alone, sitting in our private chamber with the door shut (Matt 6:6), or in the community that God has given us? Is close reading an individual or, as Wenham takes the communitarians to argue, a communal activity? I have the impression you must agree with Wenham at this point, especially if you write that individual praise is only knowable as it harmonizes with the body of Christ.13 So, arent you too critical of the communitarians?

When talking about reading the Bible, modern protestants almost inevi-tably find themselves caught within a binary polarization of the individual and the communal. if, then, one raises questions about communitarian readings, the optical illusion is immediately created that individual read-ings are being championed even if no arguments are being made to that effect. put bluntly, i think reading Scripture as an individual is a concep-tual impossibility. Conceptually speaking, to call the Bible scripture is to admit a specific type of relation to a sharply demarcated body of be-lievers. at no point in all the processes of composition, canonization, and

12. Brock, attunement to saints past and present, 159.13. ibid., 162; see also Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, 247.


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preservation and handing on to us did any single person get to say what it meant. They were always part of a community that preceded them and who had already formulated some very precise statements about who God is. let me put it this way: how did the evangelist luke know that it was appropriate to place a song of praise, the Magnificat, on Marys lips, and a similar song on simeons lips? luke was part of two traditions: the first was one of psalmody, in which he learned what counted as a psalm, and there-fore fit perfectly with what he knew of Gods working and the person Mary, and the second was one of what biblical scholars call inset poetry. luke knew that the songs of Mary and simeon would stand for us as readers as an invitation to sing their song with them. to write the story this way (and i believe the biblical authors had some liberty to compose those truths God had revealed to them) was an invitation to all the believers in this same God who would read it in the future. saint luke could know it would stand as such an invitation because he knew from books like exodus, samuel, and Jonah that such songs of praise are regular features of biblical narrative and occur at high points of the narrative at which we are already tempted to praise the mighty works of the lord.

i have criticized the communitarian account of reading scripture within the church in a manner that affirms their central interest in the church, but pushes it one step further by showing that perhaps they still do not take the church seriously enough as Gods people. namely, there are many communities and only one church, so already to call the church a community hints at a fairly important theological danger. The whole force of Singing is, first, to show the many ways in which there is a concep-tual and theological difference between an individual reading a book and a Christian reading scripture, and the main one is that Christians are never reading on their own. second, it argues that there is no recipe for generating correct readings, including, as you note, any claim that we gathered Christians have prayerfully talked this over, and so our readings must be correct. The later generations of communitarians have shown much more awareness of this second point than the earlier generations who did not admit it at all.

i simply insist that the spirit has to open the Bible to uswe cannot force that process by rushing it or manipulating it, including ensuring that we will get it right by reading it in groupsbecause we cannot escape read-ing it in groups! it is certainly possible to approach reading scripture with a wrong understanding of what the Bible is (tied, of course, to a wrong idea


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about what faith is), a view that may indeed be sub-Christian. We need the spirit through the Bible to break in on us if, for instance, we think the Bible is a resource for our moral identity formation undertaken in group discussions of moral questionsthe classic communitarian account of the church and its relation to scripture that is the target of my criticisms. My main problem with the communitarians is not that they want the church to read scripture together, but that they are often trapped in descriptions that tend to make this reading an aspect of a process of self-formation. This is why i stress that what we need to ask about criticism is how God is using scripture to criticize our thought and practice. i ask this because i think that if Christians are going to have a living witness, it is crucial that they are drawn a little further out of themselves, and to do this means releasing scripture from its captivity to moral self-formation, however conceived.

As a historian/philosopher of history, I am not entirely sure what to make of the criticism of the belief in epochs that Bernd Wannenwetsch de-ploys when responding to Singing.14 I cannot help thinking that his in-sistence on the mutual exclusivity of epoch-thinking and tradition (We can only believe either in epochs or in tradition, and those who confess the communion sanctorum certainly do the latter) is overstated, and maybe also unfair. For tradition isnt monolithic, is it? Precisely because the saints, just like the rest of us, all have their distinct voices, it would be a great loss if we were not allowed to explain their distinctiveness on the basis of what we (think we) know of the respective epoch in general. Contextual explanations of, for example, Augustines biblical exegesis, do not aim to explain him away, but, to the contrary, to understand in full detail the particularity of what this member adds to the body. Since it seems you tend to agree with Wannenwetsch, I would like to ask your opinion.

The crucial question is: with whom are we contemporaries? i would like to answer with Christ and his people. i say would like to because i must admit that i more easily see eye to eye with, say, someone with whom i share a hobby than someone at church. if i were plopped into the tent of abraham, would he seem like my father in faith, or if we were to be honest, a pretty crazy guy from another age? Wed be sitting in his tent, and if we were joining in his worship of God, we could be certain that he would be

14. Wannenwetsch, Conversing with the saints, 130.


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carrying out this worship in ways that would feel very odd to us. so are we worshipping the same God? The letter to the hebrews tells us that this is our father in the faith. Can we afford not to see eye to eye with him?

i am trying to raise Christians awareness that on close inspection it may be the case that in fact we do not share the same time with the people next to us in the pew and so are not their contemporaries. Conversely, we may be so completely their contemporaries that we cannot understand the faith of the many generations of our fathers and mothers in the faith. if you read the moral treatises of the church fathers you cannot help but face this question. how do we account for the fact that we can find ourselves reso-nating so strongly with much of the theologies of an augustine, aquinas, or a luther but have such strikingly different accounts of how to live our lives? This is a problem that is obscured by an eternal principles model of Christian ethics, which assumes that some sort of averaging process across all the moral cultures of israel and Christendom will give us the basic moral rules for Christians today. But once weve gotten these rules, arent we bet-ter than abraham? doesnt this commit us to saying to abraham, i know you are the father of faith, and that faith is something one lives, but your morals were all messed up. We would be sorely tempted to tell him that it was imprudent for him to send a servant to find isaacs wife for him, and, while we were at it, we might as well tell Jacob he was pretty irresponsible to marry leah without getting to know her a little better. This stance of superiority is endemic in modern ethical theory and parallels the sense of self-importance of modern hermeneutical theory. Both mean we end up not being able to make much of most of the stories of faith in the Bible.

Michel serres provides a helpful example of what i mean by this counter-intuitive understanding of contemporaneity.15 a late-model car is, of course, a modern object. But we have it only because ideas and practices from previous ages were drawn in and incorporated into the agglomeration we see before us. The wheel was invented in neolithic times. i am doing something, using a wheeled object, which has been done for millennia, and in doing so i am the contemporary of the earliest humans pushing a cart. i just do it with less effort. internal combustion was invented in the nine-teenth century, and so in driving a car i am the contemporary of henry Ford and all the owners of the Model t against all other times and places. at the furthest end of the spectrum i am not a contemporary of those who drive lamborghinis, and i probably never will be. ill never join a

15. serres with Bruno latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, 45.


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lamborghini owners club, go on a rally with them, talk their talk or be part of their crowdthey live in a world that is inaccessible to me. Yes, we are contemporaries as wheel users, and as internal combustion machine opera-tors, but for them other games have been added, such as the game of race car mimicry and the game of conspicuous consumption in which we must not only buy and be seen with such objects, but must know which objects to buy and be seen with in order to be socially successful. Within one frame of reference the poor kid riding to work on a bicycle and the lamborghini owner are contemporaries as wheel users, but in real life this contempora-neity is not the one that counts, or it only counts because the lamborghini club members see this shared use of the wheel as proof of their superiority. Contemporaneities are therefore not about time, but about communities, and the ways in which communities organize perception and define what counts as a good action.

Wannenwetschs refusal of epoch-thinking, on my reading, parallels serres point in being an attempt to break up our habit of separating our age as a whole from all others in preference for a vastly more differentiated view. We are always making gestures that are ancient, early modern, and cutting edge. We are therefore with some people behind the times, with others in our present time, and with a few others doing what everyone else will be doing in a few years. epoch-thinking breaks up this diversified awareness by thinking in terms of large arcs of time in which everyone exists, only to be left behind by the birth of a new epoch. if epoch-thinking has any utility it has to show the ways in which we are still parts of epochs that are only ap-parently over. Why, for instance, does augustines Confessions still seem so accessible to us today, so modern, at least in its biographical first half? The point of Wannenwetschs comment is to invite us to begin questioning our modern habit of assuming that everything from the epoch before moder-nity was more primitive than we are, that those Christians were therefore less sophisticated than us. to understand ourselves properly as moderns we have to see there are many points of unity between us and people in other ages that this undifferentiated epoch-thinking obscures. Most importantly, if we do not have the faith of abraham, isaac, and Jacob, we better not think of ourselves as churchbecause we are grafted onto that branch. if we can live the same faith as the psalmists, if we can sing their songs, we should be very pleased, not hoping to improve on them.

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Excerpt from Brian Brock's new book "Captive to Christ, Open to the World"